MSI’s final premium gaming laptop is also the world’s thinnest 15.6-inch gaming laptop. The GS63 Ghost measures just 17.7m thin, while packing an Intel Core i7 processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M.
Smething this thin requires some serious thermal management. The GS63’s Cooler Boost Trinity system holds three cooling fans inside, and a total of five heatpipes draw heat away from the processor and GPU to one of the four air vents around the laptop. Incidentally, this laptop has one more heatpipe than the quad-core Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor.
Keeping the laptop’s weight down is a lithium-magnesium alloy body, ensuring the chassis stays tough but still weighing only 1.9kg.
MSI retains plenty of connectivity ports despite the size. There are four USB ports (3x USB 3.0), HDMI and mini DisplayPort, one powered USB Type C port with Thunderbolt 3, SD card reader, LAN, and dedicated audio and mic jacks to make full use of the ESS Sabre Hi-Fi DAC fitted inside.
Hardware wise, MSI again does not skimp, with the Core i7 processor and GTX 970M as standard. Two RAM slots inside support up to 32GB DDR4 memory, while there’s another two storage bays (1x NVMe M.2 SSD up to 512GB and a 1TB hard disk). And of course, there’s a multi-colour keyboard made by SteelSeries.
Our first impressions of this thin laptop were unsurprisingly good. The metal chassis keeps the laptop very rigid despite the thickness (or lack of it), though it does result in unsightly fingerprint marks.
It is a very light laptop, considering the size and hardware – some 14-inch laptops are both thicker and heavier than this. The SteelSeries keyboard is fairly standard for gaming laptops, so it’s good to know MSI didn’t compromise that area to keep the laptop thin.
The MSI GS63 Ghost gaming laptop will be available at the same time as the other new laptops announced at Computex 2016 in August. Prices start from $1,600 (about RM6,650), with different hardware configurations based on region.
